


Skywritten

by Aiun



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Canada Moist Talkers (Blaseball Team), Charleston Shoe Thieves, Gen, Other, Simon/Fitz deep friendship, ardor for knowledge, metaphysics of blaseball, non-neurotypical comet being, she/her Fitz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:42:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27141265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aiun/pseuds/Aiun
Summary: To Fitzgerald Wanderlust, who helped make me whole again.Simon Haley discusses everything that led up to the first Pentaslam—all the way from the beginning.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18
Collections: Charleston Shoe Thieves Fanfiction





	Skywritten

Fitz is asking Simon to set down the part of their story where they hit the pentaslam, but Simon is saying they can’t start unless they start at the beginning. Fitz says that’s better than fine, she wants to hear everything. And Simon realizes that _everything_ can’t start in first person, because at the very beginning there was no "I," unless it’s the one at the very end of _1P/1982 U1 (Halley), 1986 III, 1982i._

And Fitz nods, and realizes that there’s probably another reason why Simon wants to write like that, that Simon is still figuring out who they are and how to find their fit, but that’s why she’s asking Simon to write. Even if only Fitz reads this, the process of fixing these stories, of setting them down, will teach Simon just a bit more about what it means to be Simon.

So Fitz says, tell the story exactly how you want. Just tell it. "If you need a word, I’m there." But Simon won’t need a word; they read at cosmic speed and have devoured every library in every Charleston reachable by the Beck and Call, which is all of them. All Simon ever needed was permission to start, and an addressee willing to devour Simon’s profligate river of words.

So Simon starts, and dedicates their story. _To Fitzgerald Wanderlust, who helped make me whole again_.

* * *

Simon starts in 1991, but the story starts in 1986. That’s complicated, and when Simon first tried explaining this, Fitz had trouble wrapping her head around it. But, just as comets do, she came around. The best way Simon could explain it was like this.

Comets, including _1P/Halley_ , are not normally conscious, but they _do_ perceive. When passing close to an interesting celestial object, their massive complexity of gas and dust experiences perturbations as the result of anything from reflecting light to radio waves passing through. These "celestial memories" tend to be preserved until scrambled by another close encounter.

The pass near Earth in 1986 was _so_ interesting, however—Fitz has suggested it was due to the much greater degree of information leaking directly into space by TV and radio waves—that it caused an unusual event. In 1991, Earth telescopes picked up an unusual outgassing by _1P/Halley_ , a bunch of material leaving it. This material contained, encoded, many of the perceptions of their parent comet, and an incipient consciousness that, due to its smaller size, was able to coalesce, albeit slowly on a human timescale, into consciousness, and convert those impressions of light and sound into memories, and to _think_ about them.

This comet-consciousness was still not complete when it was, somehow, collected into an egg and hatched. But it was far enough along that Simon understands what happened. The date on which Earth observers noticed this is set out in the books as February 12, 1991, so Simon tells people that’s their birthdate. It makes them twenty-nine, whatever ages mean in this world where it’s been 2020 for over a thousand days.

The comet’s sense-impressions, converted into memories, give Simon a basis of comparison between the 2020 Earth that they are currently, allegedly experiencing, and the 1986 Earth that they remember. And this knowledge is _terrifying_.

* * *

Every city is different, now. The ones that aren’t drowning look like an angry god has pointed its finger at them. Cityscapes look blasted, crumbling in the distance, albeit generally well-appointed within view of the _blaseball_ stadiums where Simon spends the majority of their time. Not that it isn’t getting worse – the newly infinite versions of Los Angeles, overlaid and intertwined; the Hellmouth that overwrote Moab. But even to start with, things were strange.

Simon was half a solar system away, and then they were hatching from an egg, and they were in the Shadows. Simon remembers _everything so clearly_ except for the Shadows, which are oddly blurry. But there they learned, or must have learned, how to be a being with an isolated mind of their own, still comet- _like_ and made of the same stuff, but with hands and legs and eyes and the knowledge of how to operate them. An existence that wasn’t a dust cloud, a name that wasn’t "the 1991 brightness anomaly observed in JPL J863/77."

And it was in the Shadows that Simon learned how to play _blaseball_ , a sport that may or may not have existed on 1986 Earth, but Simon only remembers "baseball." Which was almost identical when observed from space, and Simon isn’t the first player to ask why the pentagonal slabs of rubber they touch are called “bases” but the name of the _splort_ has an extra _l_. A talented Shadows hitter once screamed at Fitz for asking the same question. Fitz sabotaged his bats in retaliation.

Simon understands both sides of the equation. Curiosity is like breathing to Simon, but this world, also, does not quite make sense, and people don’t always react well when you tug at its seams.

Simon can’t measure how long they spent in the Underleagues, but they spent long enough to learn to act like a person, to adapt to their dynamic blue form with the evocative little comet-tail in the back of their head. Long enough to get good at hitting the ball, and _really_ fast.

And then, one day, they found themselves stumbling through a corridor into a stadium in Mexico City. Simon had never known the outdoors, and yet somehow the sensations played off Simon’s too-capacious memory and told them that the city was just a little closer to the sea than it should have been, and that bothered Simon. (The astronomically impossible solar eclipse under which they played bothered Simon, too. Somehow they noticed that _second._ )

But these anomalous details weren’t enough to stop Simon from going out and doing—in that first game, under the dim light of a solar eclipse—the one thing they knew how to do.

And, for the first thirty-eight games, it felt _good_.

* * *

Howell, Simon’s werewolf teammate who’s been around for ages, says that blaseball’s been around for ages, too. That it certainly did exist in 1986. His statements contradict what Simon saw, just like everyone else’s who remembers. Howell says that the seasons were renumbered ten seasons ago as a marketing scheme, everything reset to Season 1 so new fans would feel less obliged to keep track of blaseball’s tangled history.

Simon had protested that they’d read so many books, on any topic, and can find no reference to the _splort_ at all save a few library newspapers. Certainly no stats. Howell had replied that all previous records were collected and burned on orders of the Commissioner, _who_ , Howell went on to add in an arch tone, _is doing a great job._

In any case, Simon’s first day was near the end of season 2. Things were great, and Simon’s body felt great. Simon had had nearly the most eyes, at four, of anyone in the Moist Talkers’ shadows, and they helped on the field, too. They could see _so much_. And they were fast, fast as anyone. Hitting some of the weird pitches—including teleport balls—had proved challenging, and Simon wasn’t getting many chances to steal bases, but they were contributing and even hit a playoff home run, which was a _great_ feeling. They felt sure they were going to put together a solid season 3.

Eight games in, Simon, breathing hard, suddenly ingested a peanut.

It had not come from the stands, but from the sky. That never happened in season 2, but now it was happening, leguminous rain pelting the players like a plague of locusts. They fell to their knees, dizzy, too warm, blue skin suddenly purple all over. The world swam and swirled and darkened and was finally, after a long moment, right, but Simon’s body wasn’t, even after Elijah came over and helped them to their feet.

Simon got up less coordinated, knowing they’d be terrible with the bat, and so it proved. Not slow—too much of a comet to be _slow_ —but no longer blazing fast, no longer sprinting with the same celestial abandon.

This made Simon _angry_.

They had been snatched from space to play this game, pressed into service in replacement for what Simon would only learn at the end of the game was an umpire literally lighting Trevino Merritt on fire and watching them burn, to the horror of the players and fans and for no apparent reason other than because nobody could stop them. It took place in a world that did not make sense. All of that was true.

But the fans in Halifax loved Simon, and the players did too, and Simon loved them—loved Hobbs and Elijah and Jesús and Richmond and Joe and Eugenia and their new superstar teammate, PolkaDot Patterson, who did mind-bending Möbius stuff with the ball and told Simon to just call her _Dot_ , everyone did, and sent Simon a carefully arranged Spotify playlist consisting only of songs by The Orb, the recommendations attached to which formed the basis for Simon’s later musical taste. The sport had embraced Simon, and Simon embraced it back.

So Simon was driven to go out there and perform—to make Halifax happy, to bring smiles to Greer and Ortiz and Jenkins and Joe. (When Joe smiled you couldn’t, technically, see it, but Simon knew.)

And then a fucking sky peanut had come and fucked all of it up.

Simon vented to Dot, who told others, and soon half the locker room was calling other teams up, trying to find out what was going on. Simon was guns blazing at first, finding out they weren’t alone, that the peanuts seemed to be targeting players and to be falling at bizarre angles to ensure they were swallowed. They started calling teams up, demanding protective equipment for the players or for whole stadiums to be roofed for protection. (They tried saying something about the rogue umpires, too, but connections always seemed to drop when they tried.)

As the games went on, though, Simon’s fervor faded. It proved that some players actually _improved_ when the sky peanuts hit them, and enough players wanted that chance to improve that Simon’s movement petered out. Some Halifax engineering majors from the stands showed up to game 24 with a face shield for Simon’s batting helmet, which made Simon’s heart swell, as a reminder that the fans still cared and wanted them to be safe.

One player came close to reinflaming Simon’s passion. Matteo Prestige was miserable, too, after his allergic reaction on day 52, and spent hours on the phone with Simon in subsequent days venting, worried they’d never be the same. Matteo seemed to know more about the history of blaseball than anyone Simon had talked to, and spoke frankly about the entity known as The Peanut, an evil god who had, _per_ Matteo, previously terrorized the Shadows’ Underleagues before Simon’s time, and had done sadistic things like encasing players in giant peanut shells. The events of Season 3, including the new weather, schedule disruptions and the otherwise unexplained alteration of several players to be named after, and resemble, peanuts, were all things Matteo had seen before. He had thought he had escaped, but The Peanut had arrived, and had now devastated his abilities. Matteo didn’t really want to pitch again, but if you tried to retire in this world, you were teleported back. You didn’t have a choice.

In Matteo’s next plate appearance, he was set on fire by an umpire. Elijah waited until after the game to break the news, but it didn’t help. It was days before Simon could sleep.

* * *

Howell once called Simon a "premature anti-legumist—by which I mean, you were right." Being right was cold comfort. They had all—Talkers, Thieves, and the rest of the league—watched the horror spread further across the league by the deity that would start dramatically calling itself The Shelled One.

But this drama took ages to play out, and in the meantime, Simon kept playing blaseball. They had to keep playing. One season they hit .179. Simon started getting used to being terrible, but never forgot their initial speed, what those first days had felt like. It still seemed as if they’d left some part of them on the field, that day they were targeted by an earthnut executor.

But their teammates were upbeat, and Simon tried to look on the sunny side, to chase those moments. They still had fans, people who came to the stands _just for Simon_ , who chanted “Coooo-meeeet!” whenever Simon came to bat. On one of those sleepless nights, Dot and Mooney Doctor stayed up until 4 in the morning working with Simon to come up with the perfect hype music to listen to before a game.

Simon found a song that made them feel great, and then the team secretly convinced the PA to play it before their next at-bat. "Star Guitar" blasted and the fans lost their shit, doubly so when Simon blasted a solo homer off Miami’s pitcher, and from day 66 of season 4 the Moist Talkers now had walk-up music.

And then things were more or less the same for years, until one day they weren’t. Mooney was pitching, and Matteo’s old team was here, and suddenly Lachlan was back on the team but Eugenia was in yellow and blue and suddenly against them, and then reality shifted _again_ and Simon was a Charleston Shoe Thief.

They came up to bat, and "Star Guitar" played, surreal yet comforting, in an opposing stadium that now was home. (Snyder explained it later—the team’s PA ghost had walk-up music and pictures and such ready to go at all times for Talkers because they became Thieves so often.) They hit a flyout to Cedric and, when the game ended with a Thieves win, headed to an unfamiliar locker room that embraced them. Velasquez Alstott hugged them and said she was happy to make a new friend. Esme asked for stories about Antonio and Workman. Stu looked at the stars with them and taught them how to steal shoes.

It helped to be fast.

* * *

Fitzgerald Wanderlust is an alchemist, and she can _see_ things. She was called up from the Shadows along with an inexplicably-acquired official league sample of extinct silphium to Choux Stadium—the results of two separate fan-voted blessings.

Fitz showed up in a tweed suit with shiny hair and a perfect smile, and asked Esme, the team captain, if she had any objections to her commandeering the silphium to see if she could do something with her " _charentais_ alembic." A bewildered Esme asked if anyone knew what that was. So Simon started explaining in detail, and Esme promptly deferred to Simon, which had never happened before. Simon said they’d better let Fitz work, but then could ask Fitz if they could watch.

Simon didn’t know they were signing up for months of experimentation, discourse and poetry readings, but they’ve never enjoyed an offseason more.

At first, Fitz and Simon were largely holed up in a makeshift lab in Choux, the first well-ventilated large room they could find, full of Fitz’s antique glass equipment. Fitz tried small portions of various brews and checked with Simon to see how they felt. This process was sped up when Stu returned from an evening of sky piracy with a device that could measure a player’s blaseball in terms of star ratings, which it eventually transpired had been found on the moon. Simon asked Mooney Doctor for her girlfriend’s permission to use it, and they proceeded to raise Simon’s stats as much as they could, before bringing in Hotbox and Snyder for tests and injections of their own.  


But then it was done, and Simon, with more energy than ever, was learning new languages and deeply discussing Fitz’s _Sophia Cycle_ of poems and sipping wine in an old-fashioned but luxurious house, recently abandoned, that Fitz, catching on quickly to the team philosophy, had stolen both the keys and the deed to from a local bank. She had help in the heist from Simon’s enhanced vision, spying security combinations from the other side of a keyhole in the Beck and Call, whose doors opened out to way too many places, and that hadn’t existed in any Charleston Simon had seen in 1986, but that really didn’t seem to matter anymore. If 1986 didn’t have Fitz, it wasn’t worth much, anyway.

* * *

Simon didn’t stop wearing the face shield, but they stopped feeling scared. Season 9 was their best yet. They got 103 hits, hit 20 homers and stole 14 bases—all career highs. The fans were clapping to the opening of "Star Guitar" so loudly that, at one point in the postseason, it registered on an earthquake detector.They won and won and reached the finals against the Crabs, where they fell down 2-0 but won two more, kept it close enough, and then Stu hit a three-run homer to shame Baltimore in Choux and the crowd erupted like it never had before. They all mobbed her, lifted Stu Trololol to the sky. Everything, in that one moment, was perfect.

But the Shoe Thieves, champions, had been immediately thrown into a nightmare. They were forced to fight a horror-team of mind-controlled stars with peanut uniforms and murder in their glowing eyes, with unreal abilities who threw the ball so fast, and hit the ball so hard, that the team didn’t process at first how screwed they actually were.

They managed to score a run. Simon reached base, and fielded Patel’s too-fast groundout, and considering _everything_ they put up a good fight. But they lost in the end, and when they did, it shattered the team, the weight all coming down on them at once. Since that day, they haven’t been able to swing at the first strike—a psychological block so strangely uniform, so different from anything in all the books Simon read of how this was all supposed to work that it made Simon question further what kind of creatures they all were, that such different minds could be affected so similarly.

But Esme said it was just a curse, and that they’d win anyway.

And Esme was right. They were. They _were_ winning.

* * *

It’s a cool, crisp evening in Philadelphia, or this world’s version of it. It’s not the city Simon saw from half an astronomical unit away, when they were negative five and still part of the comet. It’s half underwater now, and largely depopulated, and there are anfractuous vines everywhere.

But this is a real place to Simon now, a place where they’ve gotten drinks and walked the streets and been treated to milkshakes with bits of pie in them by Nolanestophia Patterson in season 5 as yet another astronomically impossible solar eclipse eased away and the evening sun bathed the streets. Things are a little different this year, admittedly. Tastykake Stadium’s left stands are intended to make room for the fifth base that the fans voted in. It’s Pie-green – most stadiums went with team colors to make it look snappy.

But this is still the Pies, with Nicholas Mora on the mound with his long beard muttering to himself in Latin. Simon has faced him down before. The first plate appearance didn’t work out, but it’s the second inning and they’re already up 2-0 with _four people_ on base. It’s a golden opportunity.

* * *

Season 10 has been challenging—with the curse, the fifth base, with everything. Simon’s batting history this season runs through their head briefly.

Strike out, hit into a double play, get walked (and stranded), get walked (and stranded) again, _finally_ hit the ball but ground out, fly out, ground out, hit a single! but get stranded, strike out, get walked (and stranded) _again_ , get walked again and tagged out at second, ground out, fly out, strike out, strike out, strike out, ground out, ground out, hit a single but tagged out at third, strike out, ground out, get walked and tagged out at fourth, strike out, hit a single and watch Stu bring in Dickson and Vela, and wait and watch for your moment…

... _steal fourth_. In game six, Simon finally has a moment. They aren’t as fast as they were in that first season, Rookie of the Year by acclamation, but they’re fast enough. And when Esme smacks one, Simon takes off again and crosses fifth base, which is the same thing as fourth always was, but with everything that’s going on it’s so much harder to cross.

But Simon did it. Scored once, and even though the first plate appearance tonight didn’t work out, it’s time for them to do it again.

* * *

The Pies fans are hollering their Latin chant for Mora – "aut crustum aut mortem." _Pies or Annihilation._ Simon has always loved that. Every team, every season seems to teach Simon something new, something fascinating.

The Pies aren’t going to play a visiting player’s music, but Simon can hear "Star Guitar" anyway. It’s a connection, one that’s persevered through the years, that connects Simon with their history. Dot still has it as Simon’s ringtone. Fitz doesn’t carry a phone, so she’s learned how to play the melody on her antique piano whenever Simon knocks, which is pretty much every day, now.

Simon nods along to the claps as they get set in the batter’s box. Mora may or may not know by now what his opponent’s hearing. The Philly fans may or may not. But Fitz knows, and she’s hollering. So is Esme. So are a lot of Thieves, the bases being loaded, the excitement in the dugout palpable. But they get quiet as Mora winds up for the first time, and the fan noise fades into white noise and Simon can only hear the music.

Ball. _Flinch._ Strike two, looking.

Simon takes a deep breath, steps out of the box. Looks up for a moment at the rapidly darkening sky, spotting Saturn, one of the _planetes_ , the wanderers. Think about their own tortured journey, and about how they’re still champions, and still undefeated this year, and how, if blaseball is their lot, there is really no place they would have rather settled than right here, right now.

The ball spins, seeming to come in at half speed. Simon’s grinning as pine meets baseball, even before they see it sail into the stands.

Home run. _Pentaslam._

* * *

As Simon is trotting around the bases, lighter than air, something sails out of the sky. At first, they think someone’s throwing the ball back. They hold out their hand, and snag a glossy black orb out of the sky, oddly warm and larger than a blaseball, with four ruby droplets embedded on the outside. It makes a faint noise, and Simon has heard enough faint noises that they know nobody else on the team would be hearing this. But that doesn’t matter. They’ll tell Fitz, and Fitz will have theories, and they’ll investigate those theories together.

For now, Simon pockets the object and trots back to the dugout, touching all five bases, temporarily feeling free of gravity. They’ve done something so special, the universe itself has responded, and everything, in this moment, seems harmonious.

Fitz is hugging Simon, and she says "there’s something cosmic in your eyes." Simon grins, and Esme’s come over, and Howell, and Snyder, and soon the whole team, and there’s a bit of chaos before Stu finally has to go out to make the team’s next plate appearance.

Simon’s sitting, their shoulder right up against Fitz’s in her suit jacket—she’s not pitching, so she’s dressed to the nines—and hands what the league has declared to be a _blagonball_ over.

"It’s beautiful," says Fitz.

"I can’t wait to find out what it’s made of," says Simon. "Your lab, tonight?" They’ll go via Charleston Springs in New Jersey, which opens out into the Beck and Call, with its doors transdimensionally linked to every known Charleston. They’d normally stay in Philly for the night, but nobody’s going to mind if they sneak out, especially since Fitz has argued her investigations into the nature of reality with Simon are a form of heist against the gods. "Don’t get caught," is all Esme ever says to that.

Fitz nods, and they share an excited look. They both turn their attention back to the field, just in time to watch Stu slap a single.

It’s season 10, day 7, and Simon feels like they’ll never stop winning.


End file.
